October 30 - What will happen can't be stopped

Julia had silver hair by the time she found the letter. Hand-written, as love notes were in those days, still smelling faintly of cologne though that may have been imagination, but yellowed now at the edges, like curdled milk, curled upwards like fingers with rigor mortis. The words were still legible though, a simple sentence, written with the strength of conviction of one newly in love:

I’d sooner cut off my right arm in this lifetime than live without you

It read. Julia gave an involuntary gasp. She could picture still the day he had given it to her, handing across a book in their European history class, the note tucked within the pages like a lost missive from the medieval past. She had giggled and hid it in her school bag, and placed it in her desk drawer that night, making sure to keep it flat, without creases. Now here it was in her hands having been forgotten for – what? – forty-five years, and all of the care she had taken once had dissolved into this yellowed, cracked piece of parchment.

How could they have known, when they began? What innocents they were, she thought with something close to fear in her belly, as though she could jet back through time and warn that younger incarnation of herself of all that would ensue. There would be beautiful times; she could warn herself of that, and warn that within that beauty there were thorns for which you had to watch, take care where they pricked lest you find yourself firmly in the briar patch. She remembered moonlight on the window while he kissed her upturned lips for the first time. She remembered dinners with their fingers entwined atop the tablecloth of the fanciest restaurant in town, the waiter coughing with embarrassment to solicit their order because they had just been sitting there staring into one another’s eyes for half an hour already. Oh, they said with guilt. We’re not ready to order. We haven’t even looked yet. The menus didn’t merit looking.

She remembered how passion carried them through full days – twenty-four hours, forty-eight – without leaving their dorm room beds, freshman year forgotten somewhere between the smell of sex and the curled hair between his thighs, that twirled into little ringlets that she would wrap around her finger, a coil that would spring back. She could perform this task absently for hours, while he dozed beside her. Coil, recoil, coil, recoil. They lost themselves in the scent of one another, forgot that they were supposed to be earning degrees, beginning adult life.

They very quickly forgot other people existed on the campus. Did she even remember, now, years later, the faces of her other classmates? The yearbooks still arrived in the mailbox once a year, carrying news of her graduating class, but the names it boasted were strangers. The quadrangle, for her, was one giant ghost town the moment she left his side in bed, devoid of any sentient being except him and her. She felt his hand in hers as they strolled the flagstones; those might have been flickers of people walking past her, or sitting in the front row of her advanced French class. But then, they might have been curtains drifting in a breeze, flickers of the wind, for how little she saw them. They would collapse into one another’s arm after an hour apart in class. I missed you, they cried, wiping back tears, thumbing the mucus from the corners of eyes. I missed you so much. You’re never leaving my side again.

Oh how they laughed together when they were alone.

But what will happen can’t be stopped. Something went sour when the winter wind hit campus. Days spend indoors not for desire or pleasure, but because the snow was piled high and there was nowhere to go. I feel suffocated, she said against the sheet. He peeled it down from her nose. Because you’ve covered your face, my love, he explained, but she shook her head. That wasn’t quite right.

Three years it went on, freshman, into sophomore, into junior. Senior year, winter again. The fights had grown in intensity and spite, words snarled out as spittle flew back and forth.

Suffocated, suffocated, Julia had shrieked at him, and this time she was standing up, not under the covers in bed, and she squinted outside the window because she thought she saw other people out there, but could no longer really be sure. She reached out to steady herself, her hand on his arm, the feel of real flesh.

“Don’t you leave this room, he warned with a hiss. She made is if for the door. Don’t you leave this room or I’ll, I’ll… He snatched up the Swiss army knife that lay on his desk, next to a book by Sartre, another by Kant. Don’t you leave this room. This time there was no need to finish the threat because the knife was poised against the vein in his wrist; it bulged in protest, a frothy sea of blood below roiling in a tempest. Julia cried and shrieked, clung onto him, kissed the tears from his eyes and tasted the salt like it was honey, and begged him to understand.

Don’t you leave this room, he threatened.

She called him on his bluff.

She thought. She didn’t remember where she went that night. She wandered a campus that she didn’t recognize, wondering how she possibly had found her way to class all these four years, if now she couldn’t seem to orient herself from dorm to Main Street, to library, to cafeteria and back again. She saw a giant tree in the center of the quadrangle that had never registered in her vision. There were people walking about. People! She walked for hours, until she exhaustedly tripped into her own bedroom. The phone flashed with a message.

Hospital. Badly wounded. Provided your number as emergency contact.

These were the words she remembered. The doctor was an intern – a student, still, really – and pulled her arm roughly so they could confer in the corner. The arm had been so badly butchered into that there was no saving it. Within days, gangrene had set in, and it was amputate or let it spread. They sliced off the right arm while he slept under anesthesia. She watched them wheel him, comatose, form the operating room, a wad of bandaging covering the stump that had once been an arm that held her, caressed her, hugged her, pinched into her flesh. She wanted to kiss his forehead, but three white-coated nurses were in between her and that brow. She turned and left the hospital, because she shouldn’t be there when he woke up.

I’d sooner cut off my right arm in this lifetime than live without you

He meant it, she thought with a sigh, refolding the yellowed paper in the box in her attic, closing the lid. Some things weren’t meant to be unearthed from the past. She had a husband downstairs, with whom she’d spent forty-one years, now. True love, she decided, was never made to last that long.